YAMAMOTO & CHORAL CHAMELEON, ERI - Goshu Ondo Suite
""Eri Yamamoto transcends jazz, classical and folk forms to create a stunning new suite for jazz trio & 50-member choir. Eri Yamamoto transcended jazz, classical and folk forms in creating her new work : for jazz trio & 50-member choir. She has seamlessly melded biography, group improvisation and far-ranging compositional vocabularies in a momentous seven-part suite, featuring her longstanding trio in collaboration with New York-based Choral Chameleon, directed by its award-winning founder, Vince Peterson. The suite is based off of the 'Goshu Ondo,' a traditional circle dance song from Shiga, Japan, where it was sung during the summer Bon festival to warmly welcome ancestral spirits. The suite commences with the folk song's melodic kernel from which the rest blooms. Choral Chameleon's heterophony, polyphony and unison singing interweave with Yamamoto's trio, often with gorgeous open vowels evocative of natural scenes in works ranging from Claude Debussy through Charles Ives to